Mods: Our View – now with LIVE video!

For a while now, our forward facing camera had uploading a new image every X seconds, and the Our View page would auto load a new image every 60 seconds. While this was better than nothing.. it wasn’t quite… live.

We just upgraded our camera yesterday and we now have LIVE VIDEO! Of course, this is still dependent on our connectivity being good enough to broadcast to the server, but most of the time, this should be live and available!

Michael

Resident Tesla nut and polymath. Raised in eastern Kentucky, joined the US Navy at 19 to operate a Nuclear Reactor on a Fast-Attack submarine. After finishing his enlistment, Michael has continued to follow his passions in technology, astronomy, and of course, traveling the country.

4 Comments

Dennis
· 2015-12-14 at 15:44

hi,
Love your Rv, and you have a brilliant web site . i love the idea of having a live cam , how is this set up ?

Hi Dennis,
We’re using a MicroSeven camera. They provide the streaming service for free which is great. I have a public VPS that I VPN into from the road over a Verizon connection. From the VPS, I forward the ports for the camera inside the VPN to a device in the RV.. then that forwards to the camera.. A bit complicated, but it’s just basically plubming.. 🙂

Michael

Dennis
· 2015-12-16 at 13:57

Hi Michael , thanks for the reply , seems like a bit of plumbing ok, I have ordered the cam from micro seven , my mobile broadband is unlimited , , would I get away without the cloud service ,, or is there a reason for using it . Does it use any less bandwidth? I love the way you and David have the cams live , I would love to Have similar to show on my website for family and friends .
Thanks again and happy travels
And I love your new car ,,,,
Dennis

Hello Dennis,
The cloud server is required in most mobile installations. In order for the M7 streaming service to be able to stream your camera, they must be able to connect to it on port 554. If you’re mobile unlimited internet has a public IP address, you can likely get this working without the cloud portion. But, if like on Verizon.. they do carrier grade NAT.. then your actual mobile modem isn’t accessible to the outside world.

Thus, I setup a VPS on linode.com, VPN into that box via a RaspberryPi (using OpenVPN) and apply rules as follows:
* On linode.com linux VPS, I forward public port 554 to the Pi’s VPN IP, port 554
* On the Pi, I forward VPN IP port 554 to the internal IP of the camera on my network, port 554

Then, on the MicroSeven streaming service, I simply tell it to connect to the public IP of my VPS, port 554 to get to the camera, and viola!

Hope this helps!

Ya, the Tesla is an amazing vehicle.. it spoiled me for driving anything with an internal combustion engine 😀